Amarok weathers its own storm of reactions [LWN.net]

Amarok weathers its own storm of reactions

Posted Jun 30, 2009 22:36 UTC (Tue) by BackSeat (subscriber, #1886)
Parent article: Amarok weathers its own storm of reactions

So .0 releases are the new -rc release? And .1 or .2 the new .0 release?

This is stupid.

Move forward a few years and we'll need to wait for .5 before getting a feature-full, stable version.

I know it is received wisdom not to deploy a new version of Microsoft Windows TM until at least SP1, and ideally SP2, is available, but surely this is a(nother) Windows feature we don't need to replicate?

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Amarok weathers its own storm of reactions

Posted Jun 30, 2009 23:04 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Er, this isn't new. Remember glibc 2.0?

x.0 being wobbly and somewhat risky to use is not something specific to
proprietary software. It's not a sign of evil, either: perhaps of
excessive optimism, at best. A sizeable number of the things I've designed
have subsequently had to drag around kludges to allow people who were
relying on (what were in retrospect) horrible design errors in the first
version to not get burnt when I fixed those errors...

I for one am not smart enough to get everything right first time. I
suspect nobody is. Not even Don Knuth: TeX83 was quite a change from what
came before.

Amarok weathers its own storm of reactions

Posted Jul 2, 2009 9:45 UTC (Thu) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]

No. The thing about .0 releases is it's where the DEVELOPER INTERFACE is stable.

That's where KDE had the grief - the devs were screaming "4.0 is where the *interface* is stable - now you can port your apps without the next release breaking them all again".

The reason there weren't any user-level apps with 4.0 was because the *app* maintainers didn't appreciate chasing a moving target. They'd rather fix the code *they* broke, not fix code that *KDE* broke by moving the goalposts.

So a .zero release merely means "we've stopped messing about with the foundations, now you can build the superstructure without us breaking it". And users *shouldn't* expect that superstructure to magically appear in no time flat.

(The trouble, of course, is that distros need to support .zeros because many of their users may be those app developers, that need .zero in order to upgrade and test their apps.)

Cheers,
Wol